Vladimir Nabokov

Video of Vladimir Nabokov discussing Lolita on a television interview program. The YouTube uploader believes it is from the CBC's Close-Up, which ran from 1957-1963, but I haven't been able to confirm that elsewhere. It's cool to hear Nabokov's voice, not to mention strange as he was not a fan of live interviews, if I recall correctly.

Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Ray Bradbury
3. JRR Tolkien
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Douglas Adams
6. Mark Twain

The rest in alphabetical order by last name:

• Robert Benchley
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Albert Camus
• Raymond Chandler
• Umberto Eco
• William Gibson
• Spalding Gray
• Franz Kafka
• Milan Kundera
• Ursula K Le Guin
• George Orwell
• Dorothy Parker
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Muriel Spark
• Bram Stoker
• Jules Verne
• Edith Wharton
• HG Wells

Honorable Mentions

• Jane Austen
• Jorge Luis Borges
• George Carlin
• Philip K Dick
• James Ellroy
• Ernest Hemingway
• James Joyce
• Jack Kerouac
• Stephen King
• Herman Melville
• Flannery O'Connor
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Neal Stephenson
• John Steinbeck
• Hunter S Thompson
• Virginia Woolf
• Oscar Wilde
• PG Wodehouse
• Emile Zola

Following up on an earlier post this month, here are some more recommended short stories available online.

Magic for Beginners (2005) by Kelly Link

A collection of short stories available for PDF download. Do yourself a favor and grab it immediately, or do both you and the author a favor and buy a copy. Every quirky story is a winner. Here's part of the blurb:

Link's engaging and funny second collection -- call it kitchen-sink magical realism -- riffs on haunted convenience stores, husbands and wives, rabbits, zombies, weekly apocalyptic poker parties, witches, superheroes, marriage, and cannons -- and includes several new stories. Link is an original voice: no one else writes quite like this.

"The Euonymist" (2005) by Neil Williamson

There is a plant called a euonymus, which the dictionary tells me is "a shrub or small tree that is widely cultivated for its autumn colors and bright fruit." The entry goes on to say,

ORIGIN modern Latin (named by Linnaeus), from Latin euonymos, from Greek euōnumos ‘having an auspicious or honored name,’ from eus ‘good’ + onoma ‘name.’

In Williamson's story, Calum is a Euonymist (a namer of things) working for a bureaucracy of interstellar diplomats. Visiting home in Scotland, he is caught up in a naming crisis with far-reaching implications.

Calum knew there was a word for it. This sick feeling that had been accreting stealthily in his gut since the transport burned down from the orbital and lit in over the North Atlantic; that had formed a discernable kernel over Arran and bubbled up to his chest when they landed. When he set foot on Scottish tarmac again, he felt it tickle his heart in a most unwelcome way. It was like anticipation of something you knew you should be looking forward to but suspected might not turn out the way you wanted at all. Anticipation, yes, and there was an element of leaden fatigue to it, too. There was definitely a word. Calum pondered it as the government car shushed him southwards out of Prestwick on the rain-glittered expressway heading down the Ayrshire coast. If anyone should have been able to come up with the name of this feeling, it should have been him but, even with the implants off, his head was still mired in the Lexicon mindset. None of the words that came to him out of the residuals created in his flesh brain by the thousand-language database were quite right.

It was a human feeling. It needed a human word. He was sure it would come to him in time. Now that he was home.

A most satisfying ending to a Science Fiction story that goes to prove that rocketry and astrophysics aren't the only sciences worthy of stories about them.

"The Compass of His Bones" (2004) by Jeff VanderMeer

Set in 17th-century Peru as the last Incan Emperor is killed, a Spanish officer sets off on a Heart-of-Darkness, Apocalypse-Now mission into the wilderness. Lots of details that lend it both an air of authenticity and a discomforting reality -- hallmarks of the best in fantastical fiction. Gives going native a whole new spin.

Manuel hands Gaspar the still-warm skull of his enemy. The skull—the freedom of its eye sockets, gaping mouth, hollow nasal cavity—gives Gaspar no answers. As he stares at the skull, he imagines it talks to him. It says, “Nothing is left that can betray my will. Not eyes. Not hands. Not arms. Not legs. Nothing.” Gaspar gives a little laugh. It is hard to concentrate through the layer of sweat that always coats him; never a cool breeze in Cuzco now.

“We’re a long way from Madrid,” Gaspar says as he stares at the skull. “I wonder if the Church knows how far?”

Another must-read is VanderMeer's "Errata" (2009), which I described as "Hunter S. Nabokov: Pale Fire and Loathing in Siberia." Awesome.

"The Difficulties of Evolution" (2008) by Karen Heuler

A metaphorical take on growing up, and on the monumentally difficult task of raising children. Heuler manages a melancholy story with an uplifting ending that is unexpected yet inevitable in retrospect.

“I want to save this one,” Franka said, stroking Yagel, her youngest. The child sat in Franka’s lap, her dark eyes following the doctor happily. She chattered and waved her small hands around.

“She’s my second,” Franka added. Her hand rubbed the spot on Yagel’s ribs where it was thickening.

“Ah, yes,” Dr. Bennecort said. “Evan. What was he ― ten or so ― when it started?”

“Yes. I thought, at her age, it was too early, there should be lots of time.”

“You know it can happen at any point. I had a patient who was sixty …”

“Yes, you told me,” Franka said impatiently, and stopped herself. She took a moment to calm herself, and the doctor waited. He was good ― patient, professional ― and Franka hoped that he could help. She wanted to say, “I’m imagining the worst,” and have him reply, “The worst won’t happen.” She knew better, but she was hoping to hear it nevertheless.

Be sure to check out these other spiffy Heuler short stories:

• "Landscape, with Fish" (2008)
• "Primo Chemo" (2003)
• "The Completely Rechargeable Man"

"Al Roosten" (2009) by George Saunders

If Walter Mitty were ruled by a capricious inner voice rather than a domineering wife, he would be Al Roosten.

What the heck? thought Roosten. Whoops? Cheers? Would he get cheers? Whoops? He doubted it. Who whooped/cheered for the round bald guy in the gondolier costume? If he were a woman, he’d cheer/whoop for Donfrey, the guy with the tight ass and ripped brown arms.

The blonde cued Roosten by pointing at him while pretending to walk in place.

Oh God oh God.

Roosten stepped warily out from behind the paper screen. No one whooped. He started down the runway. No cheering. The room made the sound a room makes when attempting not to laugh. He tried to smile sexily but his mouth was too dry. Probably his yellow teeth were showing and the place where his gums dipped down.

Frozen in the harsh spotlight, he looked so crazy and old and forlorn and yet residually arrogant that an intense discomfort settled on the room, a discomfort that, in a non-charity situation, might have led to shouted insults or thrown objects but in this case drew a kind of pity-whoop from near the salad bar.

"Zora and the Zombie" (2004) by Andy Duncan

An author repeated from the last entry, Andy Duncan has been captivating in the three stories of his I've read so far. And appropriately enough comes this zombie tale that deftly blurs the line between reality, mythology, and storytelling in modern-day Haiti.

Another night, another compound, another pencil. The dead man sat up, head nodding forward, jaw slack, eyes bulging. Women and men shrieked. The dead man lay back down and was still. The mambo pulled the blanket back over him, tucked it in. Perhaps tomorrow, Zora thought, I will go to Pont Beudet, or to Ville Bonheur. Perhaps something new is happening there.

"Miss Hurston," a woman whispered, her heavy necklace clanking into Zora's shoulder. "Miss Hurston. Have they shared with you what was found a month ago? Walking by daylight in the Ennery road?"

The first short story of Duncan's I read and mentioned last time was "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse" (2007). I can also highly recommend another, "The Pottawatomie Giant" (2000), in which he ponders the true story behind a real-life bit character in the lives of boxer Jack Johnson and illusionist Harry Houdini.

On the afternoon of November 30, 1915, Jess Willard, for seven months the heavyweight champion of the world, crouched, hands on knees, in his Los Angeles hotel window to watch a small figure swaying like a pendulum against the side of the Times building three blocks away.

"Cripes!" Willard said. "How's he keep from fainting, his head down like that, huh, Lou?"

"He trains, Champ," said his manager, one haunch on the sill. "Same's you."

Duncan doesn't shy away from uncomfortable events and language that is historically accurate and hard for a modern reader to hear. This is a very good thing.

Thanks to the authors and the sites below for making these stories available.

• Electric Velocipede
• Tor
• Weird Tales
• Serpentine
• Clarkesworld Magazine
• The New Yorker
• SciFi.com
• Night Shade Books

See you next time!

"Nabokov - Pale Fire and Treo" - photo by Josh DiMauro.

So Josh DiMauro (Paper Bits) has had the notion to in a sense return Nabokov's Pale Fire to index cards, and in the process create another way to experience the story -- as a "networked" book.

[...] I’d like to take Pale Fire (which is sort of about, and definitely revolves around, an autobiographical poem written in pencil on index cards), and make an edition of it with the poem printed both traditionally (in the first section), and also on index cards. These would be spread through the pages of the book, which is ostensibly a criticism of the poem itself (although it isn’t really, and the book should certainly be read to see why).

What makes the idea seductive to me is that you could easily use semacodes to link the cards (and individual notes on the poem’s stanzas in the “commentary” pages) to an online, networked version. I imagine it as being like a blog, with wiki-style comments.

Read more...

Yesterday, BBC2 broadcast a Newsnight program on the story behind Vladimir Nabokov's last unpublished novel, The Original of Laura. I'm hoping it'll show up on BBC America or become otherwise accessible.

From "Nabokov's final literary striptease":

Nabokov made his wife Vera promise him on his deathbed that the manuscript would go the same way as Bryon's diaries [i.e., burned].

The book never appeared, and the world was entitled to think that it had read the entire corpus of the dazzling stylist.

But Vera Nabokov never fulfilled her husband's last wish. She agonised about what to do with the incomplete novel, while it gathered dust in the vaults of a Swiss bank.

She could not bring herself to commit the manuscript to the flames. On her own death, the burden passed to the Nabokovs' only child, Dmitri.[...]

But it seems he could no more resolve the dilemma of Nabokov's last book than could his mother.

With the decision to go ahead and publish it, something of a controversy has arisen, with various authors coming down on one side or the other. While I can understand and sympathize with those who want the author's wish fulfilled, I am jealous of losing any of VVN's work. Particularly when Dmitri has this to say:

"My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them. One doesn't name a book one intends to destroy."

Nina Khrushcheva's new book urges Russians to learn from the West by reading Nabokov. James Marson reports.

In the Moscow Times, via A&LD: "Speak, Nabokov"

This belief in the greatness of the Russian soul, Khrushcheva argues, is simply smoke and mirrors used to excuse the country's backwardness. Russians prefer to fall back on this dreamy myth rather than take responsibility for their own lives. Rational individualism has never taken hold with Russians, and it is instead external forces such as fate and the state that provide meaning to their lives. Living in an idealized, poetic world -- "a childish Russian paradise" -- they are unable and unwilling to engage in practical activity.

The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, Khrushcheva writes, offers a way out of this backward state through the example of his own life and his characters. As a member of a wealthy family, he went into exile after the Revolution. His past and country destroyed, Nabokov was forced to rely on himself and create his own meaning for his life.

April 23rd is shared as a birthday by several people of importance to me, one of whom is of the greatest importance of all. :)

First up, in 1564, a certain William Shakespeare who wrote, amongst other famous works, a sonnet which was read at Denyse's and my wedding:

CXVI
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me prov'd,
  I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Next up, in 1899, Vladimir Nabokov -- my favorite writer. He wrote this:

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

And finally -- Denyse, my amazing wife. Our 10th wedding anniversary is coming up in June, and it feels simultaneously like it went by in a flash and like we've been together forever. Happy birthday and much love to you, D!